rushfordeng.weebly.comrushfordeng.weebly.com/.../3/3/58335989/copyof16-17eng9master… · Web viewBorn in 1937 in a port city a thousand miles north of Shanghai, Adeline Yen . Mah

Mountain Range High School12500 Huron Street ● Westminster, CO 80234 Office: (720) 972-6300 ● Fax: (720) 972-6529http://www.mountainrange.adams12.org

School Year 2016 - 2017 Teacher NameOffice Website

Phone BlogEmail Address

Course Name English 9: Literature and CompositionCourse Description

In this course, students will explore their own cultural identities as well as the cultural identities of people from around the world through the study of literature both within and outside the United States. They will also understand how experiences and cultural expectations shape attitudes. Students will solve problems, analyze language, and provide supporting evidence in order to communicate clearly in both writing and speaking.

Unit of StudyApproximate Timeline of

Unit

Primary Text(s) with Descriptions from

Amazon.com and notation of mature content

**9th grade texts listed below with common units, but novels may be taught during any of the 9th grade

units.

Text(s) support students with the following

assessments:

Targeted Date of

Assessment

The Narrative Experience

5 Weeks American Born Chinese - Yang

A tour-de-force by rising indy comics star Gene Yang, American Born Chinese tells the story ofthree apparently unrelated characters: Jin Wang, who moves to a new neighborhood with his family only to discover that he's the only Chinese-American student at his new school; the powerful Monkey King, subjectof one of the oldest and greatest Chinese fables; and Chin-Kee, apersonification of the ultimate negative Chinese stereotype, who is ruining his cousin Danny's life with his yearly visits. Their lives and stories come together with an unexpected twistin this action-packed modern fable. American

● Students use close reading skills to analyze how complex characters develop over a text, interact with other characters, advance the plot, and develop the theme.

● Students also analyze use of literary techniques including point of view, the impact of figurative language, and how word choice creates tone. Students make strong use of textual evidence to support their claims.

● Students write narratives that develop real or imagined experiences using a range of literary techniques, including figurative language, dialogue, complex characters and graphic

Semester 1


Born Chinese is an amazing ride, all the way up to the astonishing climax. American Born Chinese is a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Young People's Literature, the winner of the 2007 Eisner Award for Best GraphicAlbum: New, an Eisner Award nominee for Best Coloring and a 2007 Bank Street- Best Children's Book of the Year

Buried Onions – Soto

Eddie's father, two uncles, and best friend are all dead, and it's a struggle for him not to end up the same way. Violence makes Fresno wallow in tears, as if a huge onion were buried beneath the city. Making an effort to walk a straight line despite constant temptations and frustrations, Eddie searches for answers--and discovers that his closest friends may actually be his worst enemies. (Profanity, Violence)

Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter – Mah

Born in 1937 in a port city a thousand miles north of Shanghai, Adeline Yen Mah was the youngest child of an affluent Chinese family who enjoyed rare privileges during a time of political and cultural upheaval. But wealth and position could not shield Adeline from a childhood of appalling emotional abuse at the hands of a cruel and manipulative Eurasian

elements to engage or entertain the reader.


stepmother. Determined to survive through her enduring faith in family unity, Adeline struggled for independence as she moved from Hong Kong to England and eventually to the United States to become a physician and writer.A compelling, painful, and ultimately triumphant story of a girl's journey into adulthood, Adeline's story is a testament to the most basic of human needs: acceptance, love, and understanding. With a powerful voice that speaks of the harsh realities of growing up female in a family and society that kept girls in emotional chains, Falling Leaves is a work of heartfelt intimacy and a rare authentic portrait of twentieth-century China. (Sexual Content, Profanity, Violence)

Speak – Andersen

"Speak up for yourself--we want to know what you have to say." From the first moment of her freshman year at Merryweather High, Melinda knows this is a big fat lie, part of the nonsense of high school. She is friendless, outcast, because she busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops, so now nobody will talk to her, let alone listen to her. As time passes, she becomes increasingly isolated and practically stops talking altogether. Only her art class offers any solace, and it is through her work on an art project that she is finally able to face what really happened


at that terrible party: she was raped by an upperclassman, a guy who still attends Merryweather and is still a threat to her. Her healing process has just begun when she has another violent encounter with him. But this time Melinda fights back, refuses to be silent, and thereby achieves a measure of vindication. In Laurie Halse Anderson's powerful novel, an utterly believable heroine with a bitterly ironic voice delivers a blow to the hypocritical world of high school. She speaks for many a disenfranchised teenager while demonstrating the importance of speaking up for oneself. Speak was a 1999 National Book Award Finalist for Young People's Literature. (Sexual Content, Profanity, Violence)

The House on Mango Street – Sandra Cisneros

Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught everywhere from inner-city grade schools to universities across the country, and translated all over the world, The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero. Told in a series of vignettes – sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous – it is the story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers. (Sexual Content, Profanity)


Transformational and Informational Writing

8 Weeks My Forbidden Face - Latifa

Latifa was born into an educated middle-class Afghan family in Kabul in 1980. She dreamed of one day of becoming a journalist, she was interested in fashion, movies and friends. Her father was in the import/export business and her mother was a doctor. Then in September 1996, Taliban soldiers seized power in Kabul. From that moment, Latifa, just 16 years old became a prisoner in her own home. Her school was closed. Her mother was banned from working. The simplest and most basic freedoms - walking down the street, looking out a window - were no longer hers. She was now forced to wear a chadri. My Forbidden Face provides a poignant and highly personal account of life under the Taliban regime. With painful honesty and clarity Latifa describes the way she watched her world falling apart, in the name of a fanatical interpretation of a faith that she could not comprehend. Her voice captures a lost innocence, but also echoes her determination to live in freedom and hope. Earlier this year, Latifa and her parents escaped Afghanistan with the help of a French-based Afghan resistance group. (Sexual Content, Profanity, Violence)

Monster – Meyers

This New York Times bestselling novel and National Book Award nominee from

● Students use close reading skills to analyze texts, making claims regarding the impact of the author’s use and transformation of source material. Students make strong use of textual evidence to support their claims.

● Students write to demonstrate an understanding of how an author draws on and transforms source material in a specific work using knowledge of detail, language and syntax to analyze what is emphasized in each account.

● Students use technology to update and publish a piece of writing, including links (i.e. to source material), perhaps soliciting reader feedback.

Semester 1, 2


acclaimed author Walter Dean Myers tells the story of Steve Harmon, a teenage boy in juvenile detention and on trial. Presented as a screenplay of Steve's own imagination, and peppered with journal entries, the book shows how one single decision can change our whole lives.Fade In: Interior: Early Morning In Cell Block D, Manhattan Detention Center.Steve (Voice Over) Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie. Maybe I can make my own movie. The film will be the story of my life. No, not my life, but of this experience. I'll call it what the lady prosecutor called me ... Monster. Supports the Common Core State Standards (Sexual Content, Profanity, Violence)

Nothing But The Truth – Avi

This Newbery Honor Book by acclaimed author Avi is available again through Scholastic--in an After Words paperback edition!In this thought-provoking examination of freedom, patriotism, and respect, ninth-grader, Philip Malloy, is kept from joining the track team by his failing grades in English class. Convinced that the teacher just doesn't like him, Philip concocts a plan to get transferred out of her class. Breaking the school's policy of silence during the national anthem, he hums along, and ends up in a crisis at the center of the nation's attention. (Sexual Content,


Profanity, Violence)

The Odyssey – Homer

If the Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, the Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of everyman's journey through life. Odysseus' reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival in his encounters with divine and natural forces, during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, is at once the timeless human story and an individual test of moral endurance. (Sexual Content, Violence)

Rhetorical Analysis

11 Weeks 9th Grade English Anthology includes a selection of short pieces, poetry, speeches and essays.

How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent – Alvarez

The Garcías—Dr. Carlos (Papi), his wife Laura (Mami), and their four daughters, Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía—belong to the uppermost echelon of Spanish Caribbean society, descended from the conquistadores. Their family compound adjoins the palacio of the dictator’s daughter. So when Dr. García’s part in a coup attempt is discovered, the family must flee. They arrive in New York City in 1960 to a life far removed from their existence in the Dominican Republic. Papi has to find new patients in the Bronx. Mami, far from the compound and the family retainers, must find herself. Meanwhile, the girls try

● Students analyze how an author’s ideas or claims are developed and refined by their use of rhetorical and persuasive techniques.

● Students produce an argumentative speech or a presentation that embeds rhetorical appeals and techniques and includes research.

Semester 2


to lose themselves—by forgetting their Spanish, by straightening their hair and wearing fringed bell bottoms. For them, it is at once liberating and excruciating being caught between the old world and the new, trying to live up to their father’s version of honor while accommodating the expectations of their American boyfriends. Acclaimed writer Julia Alvarez’s brilliant and buoyant first novel sets the García girls free to tell their most intimate stories about how they came to be at home—and not at home—in America. (Sexual Content, Profanity, Violence)

Romeo and Juliet – Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet is a tragic play written early in the career of William Shakespeare about two teenage "star-cross'd lovers" whose untimely deaths ultimately unite their feuding households. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetime and, along with Hamlet, is one of his most frequently performed plays. Today, the title characters are regarded as archetypal "young lovers." (Sexual Content, Profanity, Violence)

Romiette and Julio- Draper

When Romiette Cappelle and her best friend, Destiny, decide to order The Scientific Soul Mate System from the back of Heavy Hunks


magazine, they're not sure what they're getting into. But Destiny, a self-proclaimed psychic, assures Romi that for $44.99 plus shipping and handling, it's the only way they're ever going to find out who their soul mates really are. If nothing else, maybe Romi will get some insight into that recurring dream she's been having about fire and water.But they never expect that the scented candle and tube of dream ointment will live up to their promises and merge Romiette's destiny with that of Julio Montague, a boy she's just met in the "cosmos" of an Internet chat room. It turns out they go to the same high school, not to mention having almost the same names as Shakespeare's famous lovers! Sweet-scented dreams of Julio have almost overtaken Romi's nightmares......when suddenly they return, but this time in real life. It seems the Devildogs, a local gang, violently oppose the relationship of Romiette and Julio. Soon they find themselves haunted by the purple-clad shadows of the gang, and the fire and water of Romiette's dream merge in ways more terrifying -- and ultimately more affirming -- than even Destiny could have foreseen. (Sexual Content, Profanity, Violence)

Analyzing Point of View/Literary Analysis

11 Weeks Bless Me, Ultima – Anaya

Antonio Marez is six years old when Ultima comes to stay with his family in New Mexico. She is a curandera, one who

● Students use close reading skills to analyze texts, making claims regarding the impact of the author’s cultural experience on their

Semester 1


cures with herbs and magic. Under her wise wing, Tony will test the bonds that tie him to his people, and discover himself in the pagan past, in his father's wisdom, and in his mother's Catholicism. And at each life turn there is Ultima, who delivered Tony into the world-and will nurture the birth of his soul. (Sexual Content, Profanity, Violence)

Kaffir Boy – Mathabane

Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa's most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness of apartheid, he learned to measure his life in days, not years. Yet Mark Mathabane, armed only with the courage of his family and a hard-won education, raised himself up from the squalor and humiliation to cross the line between black and white and win a scholarship to an American university. (Sexual Content, Profanity, Violence)

Of Mice and Men – Steinbeck

Over seventy-five years since its first publication, Steinbeck’s tale of commitment, loneliness, hope, and loss remains one of America’s most widely read and taught novels. An unlikely pair, George and Lennie, two migrant workers in California during the Great Depression, grasp for their American

point of view and the author’s use of literary techniques. Students make strong use of textual evidence to support their claims.

● Students write essays demonstrating an understanding of the influence of cultural experiences on an author’s point of view as reflected in works of literature.


Dream. They hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they land jobs on a ranch in the Salinas Valley, the fulfillment of their dream seems to be within their grasp. But even George cannot guard Lennie from the provocations, nor predict the consequences of Lennie's unswerving obedience to the things George taught him. Of Mice and Men represents an experiment in form, which Steinbeck described as “a kind of playable novel, written in a novel form but so scened and set that it can be played as it stands.” A rarity in American letters, it achieved remarkable success as a novel, a Broadway play, and three acclaimed films. (Sexual Content, Profanity, Violence)

The Merchant of Venice – Shakespeare

The Merchant of Venice is one of Shakespeare’s most beautiful plays and, conversely, his ugliest. Juxtaposed within the same conceptual frame are heavenly and musical harmonies, romantic love, materialism, and racism. (Sexual Content, Profanity, Violence)

The Kite Runner – Hosseini

The New York Times bestseller and international classic loved by millions of readers. The unforgettable, heartbreaking


story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies. A sweeping story of family, love, and friendship told against the devastating backdrop of the history of Afghanistan over the last thirty years, The Kite Runner is an unusual and powerful novel that has become a beloved, one-of-a-kind classic. (Sexual Content, Profanity, Violence)

To Kill A Mockingbird – Lee

Harper Lee's Pulitzer prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep south—and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred, available now for the first time as an e-book.One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and


savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father-a crusading local lawyer-risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime. (Sexual Content, Profanity, Violence)

Parents or students may opt out from materials with mature content by providing an email or other written request for assignment of alternate material to the instructor. The written notice should be provided to the instructor at least five school days prior to the planned commencement of the mature content so that the instructor has adequate time to identify alternative materials and instructional supports for the student. An opt-out notice provided less than five school days in advance of commencement of the material shall not preclude the students/parent from opting out but may delay the identification of alternative materials and implementation of alternative instructional supports.

For additional information regarding primary texts in alignment with Superintendent Policy 6230, the links below are intended to provide families with multiple perspectives (The opinions and views expressed at or through these websites are the opinions of the designated authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of the classroom teacher.)

● Amazon book reviews: www.amazon.com● Goodreads: www.goodreads.com● Common Sense Media: www.commonsensemedia.org● Kirkus Reviews: https://www.kirkusreviews.com● Thriving Family--A Focus on the Family publication: www.thrivingfamily.com/family/Media.aspx

Grading Scale Grade Percentages/WeightsA 90-100 Writing and Composition

(Summative Assessment)36%

B 80-89 Reading for all Purposes (Summative Assessment)

27%

C 70-79 Speaking and Listening(Summative Assessment)

17%

D 60-69 Research and Reasoning (Summative Assessment)

10%

F 59 or below

Practice (Formative Assessment)

10%

*Weekly progress grades are posted at https://ic.adams12.org/campus/portal/adams12.isp

Assessment/Practice

Proficiency Levels

4 Advanced Understanding of the Standard

3 Meets the


Standard2 Approache

s the Standard

1 Does not Meet the Standard

M Missing

General Expectations● Grades are based upon the demonstration of proficiency on units associated with a standard given during each formative or summative

assessment. Formative grades in addition to summative unit assessments will be used to holistically determine your grade.● Summative: 90% Summative measures of achievement are taken when unit master is expected. (i.e., unit tests, culmination of a project,

embedded assessments, etc.) All Summative Assessments will have a score of 4, 3, 2, 1, or M.● Formative: 10% Formative assessments measure the scaffolding skills and/or content embedded in the unit. Formative assessments are taken

frequently, after a student has practiced a skill or become familiar with content. Examples of formative assessments include but are not limited to exit tickets, paragraphs, oral check for understanding, warm-ups, stages in a large project, etc. Formative Assessments may be marked with a 4, 3, 2, 1, M, as well as an S for Satisfactory, an I for Incomplete, or a U for Unsatisfactory.

● Assessments will be graded based on teacher/district/state rubrics.● On group projects, students will receive a grade for individual work and a group grade.● Grades are based on achievement of Content Standards and Grade Level Expectations.

Documents

rushfordeng.weebly.comrushfordeng.weebly.com/.../3/3/58335989/copyof16-17eng9master… · Web viewBorn in 1937 in a port city a thousand miles north of Shanghai, Adeline Yen . Mah